People swear up and down these things are real intelligences and not stochastic parrots until the ethical questions come out and then they're just fancy washing machines.
However I do think that they might have some limited awareness and that some conversations might be more pleasant and others more frustrating or disquieting. But of course no one can prove it.
I consider LLMs more like the giant instruction book in Searle's Chinese Room. If you'd asked me 20 years ago I'd have said such an instruction book wasn't possible, as the nuances of things like sarcasm and irony were lost on even the most advanced the NLP systems of the day. But it turns out a book with 380GB of data can simulate human intelligence better than the average human can.